Product Feeds using ColdFusion

• Google Shopping
• Bing Shopping
• eBay Commerce Network / Shopping.com Feed
• Nextag
• PriceGrabber
• Shopzilla / Bizrate Feed
• ResellerRatings
• TheFind

Google has moved to display a new Google Shopping commercial model formed on Product Listing Ads, formerly in the United States then rolling out globally. These changes and improvised user experience is believed to build new opportunities for sellers and thus help all size retailers to attract more and more shoppers to their stores.

The refined product feed guidelines should be followed by the merchant while uploading a feed. These guidelines include:

• Higher quality images
• Support for merchant defined multipacks
• Updated color attribute
• Updated description attribute
• Updated requirements for unique product identifiers
• Energy efficiency labels and unit pricing (targeting European Union and Switzerland only)
• Tag individual items especially to promote non-family safe items

Any changes to the product feeds can be submitted as test feeds and then tested using the debugging tools, therefore meeting the requirements.

Bing Shopping is a platform where online merchants can advertise their products for free. to get included in the program, Bing shopping needs a shopping feed from every retailer which is to be updated through Microsoft’s ad Center at least once in a month. Following is all about how to get started with Bing Shopping.

Optimize the Merchant Category column – This is the most important one to categorize the items. More is the specification with your categories; more effective Bing shopping will target the shoppers. Try to aim special occasions or holidays by bringing them relevant with the products.

Set categories in the Bing Shopping Account Management Tool – Setting them helps you to easily select the categories in which you wanted to sell the product.

Include appropriate unique product identifiers to rank in Bing shopping results – UPCs, ISBNs and MPN attributes helps the Bing shopping match your product so that there are high chances to display it in comparison with other top company products. Here the shoppers can easily compare prices and go ahead with purchasing.

Shopping.com is now rebranded as the eBay Commerce Network. Many of you may not be aware that the eBay purchased Shopping.com about 8 years ago and since then it has evolved to be a more robust commerce system. It allows the merchants to maximize their product exposure on the advertising platform.

Consumers shopping practices have changed a lot since 1997, when shopping.com was launched first. There were very few online options then to research and buy products. But, today consumers have many options and they nearly visit 10.4 websites while purchasing anything.

To keep intact with changing nature of shoppers, this product feed has turned into an active commerce ad network highly capable of connecting merchants with customers.

NexTag is a leading comparison shopping site for products, travel, automobiles, financial services, education plus more. The proprietary technologies and algorithms of the NexTag allow the customers to quickly compare the prices and choose the best deals among millions of products and services. It is studied that 30 million customers per month use NexTag to search products.

Established in 1999, it has shopping sites that target US, UK, Germany and France visitors. It is highly efficient sales site with high traffic and performance based pricing. The NexTag core features include:

• A promotional messaging platform to easily implement marketing messages and voucher codes
• Automated, free ROI tracking system to optimize the campaign
• 80% of the visitors are unique
• Trusted Seller Programs and Buyer Reviews which gain accuracy and increase your sales likewise

PriceGrabber feed allows merchants to arrange for the shoppers to pick up purchased products directly from the merchant’s location, rather than arranging a delivery. If the merchant will choose this option while listing a product on the PriceGrabber Storefronts Service, the city, state and zip code will be displayed along with the item’s listing. This will ease the convenience to pick the particular item from the merchant’s location.

PriceGrabber’s shopping feed was established in 1999 and since then it has brought a new revolution in online shopping. This eases the merchants without an online site to post their products and services on this PriceGrabber’s store builder option.

It features a Merchant rating system which allows the shoppers to write their decision or feedback. There is also a five star scale on which the merchants and shoppers can rate their services and these feedbacks and ratings are archived by this feed. Therefore, anyone coming to this site can check the feedbacks before heading for any transaction.

PriceGrabber not only provides product images, features and descriptions, but also provides merchant and product ratings along with narratives. This can save money, time abd effort for the shopper to choose a product on the PriceGrabber feed.

Shopzilla or Bizrate feed is the easiest, fastest and most accurate shopping search engines on the web. It is the most effective way to reach the target customers while offering control over the price you spend for the traffic. Although there is no set up fees, you are allowed to pay only for the clicks directed to your online store.

ShopZilla allows the merchants to list the products in the shopping search engine. When the customers find for the products, the product lists appear in the search results. A click on the listing will take your online site.

Since the year of its establishment in 1996, it has been the pioneer in Web retailing, research and customer satisfaction ratings. Shopzilla’s customer certified ratings program is used by many merchants to promote, improve and track their customer satisfaction performance.

ResellerRatings Feed is formed in 1988 and is the leading source for customers looking for reviews of online merchants and consumer generated ratings. The primary aim of this is to provide first-hand customer accounts of online merchants to highlight the best products and thus help customers.

ResellerRatings offer online merchants the most extensive reputation management tools to –

• Request for shopper reviews
• Post public replies
• Contact reviewers to resolve issues
• Flag reviews from non-shoppers

This feed currently has nearly 40,000 online merchants and over 1 million customer reviews.